Three-Oh

I turn 30 this year and I'm totally digging it. I was never very good at being in my 20s: I tend to be a pretty serious kind of guy, and even my humor is usually masking something deadly earnest. When you're trying to have a good time, chill with your friends at some hip bar listening to whatever Black Eyed Peas song is the hit this summer, wondering "What is the significance of this moment, and could I be doing something better with it?" is the job of Captain Bringdown.


So I'm looking forward to entering middle age: in a lot of ways I feel like it's where I'm always supposed to have been. I'm going to try my very best to be good at it. I even look forward to this...

Men at Forty

Donald Justice

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be  
Coming back to.


At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,  
Though the swell is gentle.


And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying  
His father’s tie there in secret,


And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.  
Something is filling them, something


That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope  
Behind their mortgaged houses.




I await being filled with that something. And yes, that is what she said.